Oculus' John Carmack Speaks About Acquisition

Oculus CTO John Carmack has published a comment on a blog post from Peter Berkman in which he reveals his own thoughts on Facebook”s acquisition of the company. Even though Carmack has an important role within the virtual reality company, he says that of all the companies that could have acquired Oculus, Facebook was not the one that he expected to do so.

I wasn”t personally involved in any of the negotiations. I spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg, and the next week I find out that he bought Oculus. – Carmack

Berkman, who wrote the original blog post that Carmack responded to, says that people should be worried about Facebook collecting data from the VR device.

Even though Carmack agrees that Facebook is a somewhat odd company to buy Oculus–especially since the deal went down for $2 billion–he knows that they had to partner with someone in order to succeed in the VR industry.

I share some of your misgivings about companies “existing and operating only to be acquired”. I am a true believer in market economies, and the magic of trade being a best online casino positive sum game is most obvious with repeated transactions at a consumer level. – Carmack

People who backed Oculus when it first appeared on Kickstarter have been quite upset about the acquisition, as it does not seem like the correct path for a crowdfunded startup. Given Facebook”s bad reputation among many tech enthusiasts, people are particularly worried about Oculus” future.

Unlike Valve, which has remained independent and build itself from the bottom up, Carmack says that Oculus could not be like that because it is working in the field of virtual reality.

The experience is too obviously powerful, and it makes converts on contact. The fairly rapid involvement of the Titans is inevitable, and the real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who. – Carmack

Question – Is Oculus going to be headed in the same direction now that Facebook has acquired it?

Summary: Oculus VR CTO John Carmack has responded to some criticisms of Facebook”s acquisition of the company. He says that Oculus had to work with someone, but agrees that Facebook was an odd choice.